Justin,
great email and suggestions. I agree with all of your suggestions and would
be happy
to help to create test plans based on WCAG 2.0 or to create profiles and
test scenarios
for screen readers.
Armin
On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 12:01, Colin Clark <colinbdclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Justin,
>> Really thoughtful response. Some comments inline.
>>> On 24-Dec-09, at 10:29 AM, Justin Obara wrote:
>> I've been doing some more thinking about that a11y testing stuff that
>> Armin brought up a while ago. (Sorry that this is so late coming.)
>>>> Maybe what we could do is to make test plans based on wcag 2.0.
>>>> I gather from being part of a conversation with Jan, the other day, that
>> wcag 2.0 will be legislated in some manner.
>>>> I think WCAG 2 is pretty sensible as far as accessibility standards go. As
> you say, it is inevitably going to form the basis for a lot of updated
> international legislation. It's also general and conceptual enough to enable
> design flexibility and a layered approach. That said, this general-ness will
> also be something we struggle with a bit as we create those WCAG 2-compliant
> test plans for Infusion.
>>> What I'm imaging we could do, is to indicate what level (A, AA, or AAA)
>> each component complies with in it's base configuration, or is possible to
>> achieve.
>>>> For example the video player is capable of display captions, but it is up
>> to the integrator to supply them.
>>>> This distinction makes a lot of sense. Out of the box, we ship at a certain
> level of compliance, but clearly a user's integration choices--as well as
> their content--will affect accessibility either positively or negatively.
> Articulating some of these choices will help implementers understand
> accessibility better, too. I can imagine that Armin and Alison's a11y page
> would be useful for discussing these sorts of issues.
>>> Here are a couple critiques of wcag 2.0 (they are both from 2006 though)
>>http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2>>>>http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/wcag-guidelines-20.shtml>>>> There were lots of controversies surrounding WCAG 2 as it was being
> developed; standards like this can be really tough to have complete
> consensus on. There's always a grain of salt or two to take with Joe Clark's
> criticisms of WCAG, but there are some interesting points here, too. I'm
> particularly keen to look more into some of the issues around off-screen
> positioning and CSS layouts.
>>> We are still faced with an issue of what AT's to test with. In looking at
>> the builder, we found that putting the text of a button inside of a span,
>> caused the button to only announce "Button" in NVDA. However, if you changed
>> to focus mode, it did read it properly. This leads me to believe that to
>> some degree AT's are essentially broken, or at least not fully functional at
>> the moment.
>>>> That's the same conclusion I've come to as well. Everett seemed to agree,
> but I hesitate to say it definitively, since I'm not actually an AT user
> myself.
>> Writing a screen reader isn't a trivial task, and technology is changing so
> fast. But I can't shake the feeling that a lot of the existing crop of
> products haven't successfully embraced the Web and its evolving interaction
> idioms. With NVDA and Orca, I hope the open source world has a chance to
> rethink usability for screen reader users over the long run.
>>> It seems to me that wcag 2.0 will allow us to say, for example, if the
>> aria semantics are correct, then we are compliant whether or not the AT's
>> actually work properly. I'm not quite sure this is correct and it is a poor
>> approach at best. However, it will prevent us from getting into a situation
>> where we are making vain attempts at implementing concessions for a variety
>> of AT's.
>>>> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. We want our stuff to work amazingly and
> be super easy to use for a whole variety of users. Our start on that is to
> create an open architecture, use great semantic markup, and ensure we're
> following the latest and best techniques like ARIA.
>> Beyond that, we still have to take advantage of useful workarounds, as well
> as progressive enhancement, to make the day-to-day experience of using
> Infusion better.
>>> So here is my suggestion.
>>>> 1) Make test plans based on wcag 2.0 and aim to have every component ship
>> with defaults which are at least AA and include options which ensure
>> integrators can achieve at least AA compliance.
>>>> +1.
>>> 2) Indicate some how, which level of compliance each component meets
>>>> Also +1, assuming we also outline some of the considerations an implementer
> should take into account when using our components.
>>> 3) At this point, assume that proper development techniques will yield AT
>> support (with exceptions listed below)
>>>> For the cases where "proper" is clearly quantifiable, +1. This part will
> still be a challenge.
>> In the other cases, we'll have to continue to work towards change and
> improvement in ARIA and other essential technologies.
>>> 4) Continue testing keyboard a11y in A-grade browsers
>>>> +1.
>> Thoughts? Comments?
>> Colin
>>> ---
> Colin Clark
> Technical Lead, Fluid Project
>http://fluidproject.org>>-------------- next part --------------
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